Ann: Change in substantial holding - J.P.Morgan , page-13

re: Ann: Change in substantial holding - J.P.... I took some time today to do a bit of data mining and see what is going on with this whole JP Morgan situation.

What piqued my interest was that JP got about 46m shares from RBS Sempra Metals, now instead of trying to offload the HGO shares they have increased their holding, quite a bit too.

So I had a look at their second substantial shareholder notice and saw they have a 'proprietary interest' which basically means 'personal interest' and that made me think about whether I'd seen big volumes going through over the past few months. 18.9m shares purchased in the specified time frame (2 Mar - 1 Jul according to the release) isn't easy to hide so I started some searching through the broker archives on Iress between those dates and JPM didn't come up anywhere, in fact between those dates only something like 3m of net positional changes occurred. The shares must have come from somewhere so I took the search out wider to between January and May of 2010 and JPM didn't come up there either, instead it was Goldman Sachs Partners who bought in the order of 18.9m shares at an average price of 38.2 cents, the coincidence became confirmation of tallying up the average price paid on the JPM announcement came to 38.2 cents. So long story short, by joining the dots it shows that GSP bought the stock and JPM purchased it from them at some point during the period specified for the prices specified via an Off Market Transfer.

This is also why you won't see 'on market purchase' on the JPM announcement.

One other thing to note is that in light of this information JPM have not purchased any stock on market! ALL of it has come through transactions, a very 'arms length' situation.

So I can think of many different reasons as to what might be going on but none of which I can be certain of, I thought that maybe GSP were trying to leverage a takeover of ESG and upon deciding it wouldn't happen sold their stake to a willing party, but then why would JPM double down with the options as well? Another idea was after seeing GSP have been net sellers of ESG stock over the past few months, so if they were to be doing some work organising a deal for ESG then they possibly don't want a conflict of interest in either stock and could be pulling out for that reason. But then why would JPM sit pat when something like this is brewing? Unless they are warehousing the shares...

Regardless something is happening and I'm interested to see what others are thinking.